I am a Tombstone Tourist: someone who loves to wander cemeteries. I find it akin to visiting a museum: an opportunity to enjoy rarely seen sculpture, intricate carvings, and amazing architecture, all in a tranquil outdoor setting. This blog is about cemetery culture, art, history, issues of death, and genealogy - subjects of current relevance. I usually find something that intrigues me and makes me want to dig deeper. Care to join me? Read on...

Friday, June 19, 2015

You’ve probably heard the cliques’: what goes around comes around; everything old is new again … While these sayings may have more than a bit of truth about them, it “ain’t necessarily so” in the funeral industry where non-traditional is catching on.

Baby Boomers are the catalyst to this change, thanks to “thinking outside the box” and wanting a service that is unique to their lives. Themed funerals are starting to take off, and services are becoming memorial events.

In Texas, one funeral home director decided to offers some options to the traditional funeral home. Funeral Director Jeff Freidman operates Distinctive Life Funeral Home, (yes, a traditional funeral home) in Plano, but he has also set up a storefront in Richardson Texas where you can shop for grandma’s casket in a nicely lit, comfortable showroom with real music playing. Distinctive Life also has several vans equipped with a selection of urns, many unique and creative (A floating urn anyone?) along with a computer on which you can view and select the casket you’d like without leaving home.

At Adams Funeral Home in Los Angeles, mourners simply pull up to a bank teller-like window and push a button. A curtain raises, music plays and you have a few minutes to say your good-byes to the deceased.Wade Funeral Home in St Louis has become known for their themed viewing rooms, offering a familiar setting like “Big Momma’s Kitchen” where family and friends can gather in a homey 1950s style kitchen as a platter of fresh fried chicken waits on the stove.Hodges Funeral Home in Naples Memorial Gardens offers family and friends the opportunity to sit and reminisce over a glass of wine in their wine bar providing a more relaxed and calm way to mourn and remember. Amid comfortable chairs, high top tables, and racks of wine, this modern wine cellar provides a more laid-back, tranquil vibe than your average funeral home viewing room. The Neptune Society, the largest cremation-only provider in the U.S., takes cremated remains and mixes them with cement before placing them in a mold. Once the mold is formed, the shaped piece is then taken down to the world’s first underwater “cemetery”, actually a cremation memorial park, and placed on the Atlantis Memorial Reef with a memorial plaque. There, the molds become a permanent part of the ever-changing man-made reef.You can even light up the sky when the Celebrate Life Program mixes your ashes with phosphorous to create a private fireworks display for family and friends.One things for sure, Boomers do not intend to go “quietly into that good night” – at least not without some serious shake up of the traditional, and a touch of individualized flair on the way out.~ Joy

Friday, June 5, 2015

The
Victorians were obsessed with death – in a nice way. There was a code of
etiquette for both the living, and the deceased. The reasons for their "undying" interest were numerous;
death was an every-day occurrence, it happened at home, and mourning was a way of life - a mourning period
could last over two years.A few of the main
death fears held by Victorians included being buried alive, being dug up by body
snatchers, and the horrible decay that the body went through.

Fisk's Patent

Almond
Dunbar Fisk patented a product in 1848 to alley all three fears with his “air-tight coffin of cast or raised metal.”
With a Fisk Iron Coffin, the deceased was visible for viewing (and making sure
they didn’t move.) The remains would be well preserved, continuing to look exactly
as they did when they died, and iron coffins were almost impossible to break into.

The
Fisk Metallic Burial Case was shown at the New York State Agricultural Society
Fair in 1849, along with the American Institute Exhibition in New York City
later that year. Orders were taken and production began.

The
coffin was form fitting, resembling an Egyptian sarcophagus with the face and
feet higher than the body. A small glass window was fit above the face for
viewing.

Robbing the Grave

There
were several benefits to using an iron coffin including the smell of decay was
trapped in the iron case much better than a wooden coffin. Resurrectionists
were not able to “bash and grab,” (Bust open a wooden coffin and pull the
deceased out by their neck for the purpose of selling bodies to anatomy
schools.) and they looked secure.

John C. Calhoun

But
security was not cheap; the price of a Fisk coffin was between $50 and $100. (A
wooden casket cost $2.) Former U.S. Vice-President and Secretary of State John
C. Calhoun was buried in a Fisk coffin in April 1850, and after that, demand grew.

But
Almond Fisk was not doing well; he had become ill while fighting a fire that
destroyed his foundry in 1849 and had never recovered. In October of 1850, Fisk
died. His investors, John G. Forbes and Horace White continued on with the
company.

An
1851 ad for the Fisk’s Metallic Burial Case touted how “they preserve the forms we love, in something more like a pulseless
slumber than a dread decay, they have the appearance of rich and heavy folds of
drapery, thrown over the form, adapted to the shape, and realizing the line of
“Thanatopsis.”

Soon
after Crane, Breed and Company of Cincinnati obtained a license to
produce Fisk coffins and several modified versions were introduced to
the public. W.M.
Raymond and Company of New York also produced several different versions
of
Fisk’s original iron coffin.

The
form fitting shape gave way to sleeker, more box-like shape with a window over
the face and another over the hands of the deceased. The size of the windows
increased and soon the top was all glass except for a dividing bar across the
middle.

Vladimir Lenin

Glass coffins became very popular in the late 1800s in Germany, especially when used for royalty
and revered leaders. Vladimir Lenin is one of the most famous leaders who lies in state
in a glass coffin in Red Square in Moscow. Others who rest eternally in a glass
casket include Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, China's Mao Zedong, Vietnam's
Ho Chi Minh, and North Korea's founding leader, Kim Il Sung.

Casket with Glass Cover

While
all-glass coffins are favored for viewing, they are not usable as a burial case
because they are too fragile to have earth heaped on top of them and maintain
their form.

Today, glass caskets are still available, although not in the form you mightexpect.
A
glass casket is now a glass top that is placed over the deceased to
deter
mourners from touching the corpse. This also helps deter mourners from
clipping hair, or pieces of clothing from the deceased to keep or sell
as a
memento.

Fisk Coffin at Berry Funeral Home

To
view one of these “insightful” coffins, visit the Berry Funeral Home in
Knoxville, Tennessee; Herr Funeral Home in Collinsville, Illinois; and the Pink
Palace Museum in Memphis, Tennessee.

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